Who’s finding JeanLove during lockdown? ❤️
On April 2, just as the country was beginning to lock down, I posted on Facebook about “Jean’s Shelter-in-Place Zoom Dating Experiment:” if my friends filled out the Google form, I would connect them with other friends for Zoom dates. Over the course of the next few days, so many people signed up that I put up the JeanDate website. Today, there are over 150 people participating in JeanDate almost 400 people on the wait list. The craziest part is that I occasionally have long-lost friends write to me because their friends have somehow heard about JeanDate and want to be part of it.
There’s clearly demand—at least, among my friends, who mostly have the privilege of keeping their jobs and working from home—for love during lockdown. But are people able to form lasting connections over Zoom during a global pandemic?
This isn’t Married at First Sight and everybody is still locked down, so I can’t tell you how many of these matches have blossomed into lasting, IRL connections. What I can tell you is what I’ve observed. I’ve made almost 100 matches, over 30% of which make it to the second date. Not only do I mediate all the matches, but I also debrief with people after their dates, so I’ve gotten some really interesting insight into not only how people are deciding who to Zoom, but how they’re deciding who to keep Zooming with. This has led me to build up some intuition not only around how people date, but also around who is likely to find what they’re looking for under the circumstances.
Over the course of JeanDate, I’ve developed three categories for my Zoom daters: emotional/intellectual-first, lifestyle-first, and physical-first. Of course, for most people emotional/intellectual connection, lifestyle, and physical connection are all important—but, as with everything else in life, people need to have priorities. And while it may seem like it’s pretty clear who fares the best in a Zoom-only setting—but it’s actually not so cut-and-dried. And given how much I’ve adjusted how I categorize people over the course of running JeanDate, I’d say which category you find yourself—or somebody else—falling in may be surprising as well.
Emotional/intellectual-first daters
Maybe it’s specific to my social network, but I feel like most people aspire to emotional/intellectual-first connection as the platonic ideal of dating. You connect with someone based on some moment of emotional intimacy or some deep shared intellectual interest, and that is the foundation of your everlasting love. It doesn’t matter what they look like. But, based on all the movies and books, if they are beautiful inside, they are probably beautiful outside too.
Here are a couple of things I’ve observed about people over the course of running JeanDate:
In the Zoom situation, at least, it seems actually pretty rare to be an emotional/intellectual-first dater. As part of the JeanDate intake form, I ask people “what works” and “what doesn’t work” in a fairly free-form way. Most people talk at length about career, emotional maturity, and sharing interests in lifelong learning; very few people have put anything about physical appearance traits. What I’ve noticed when proposing matches with people and debriefing with people, they’re actually quite picky about the physical aspect—and often in nonconventional ways. (Also, interestingly, the people who put things about physical traits have been much more laid-back than I’ve been expected about sticking to that.) I feel like if people felt like they had permission to embrace what they like that’s not emotional/intellectual, no matter how cliche or weird it is,
Even emotional/intellectual-first daters have physical ways of manifesting their connection. Especially given the popularity of the show Love is Blind, one might think that people can fall in love just talking to someone and not even looking at them. But there is a reason why only a small fraction of the couples in Love is Blind actually made it long-term! (And I do feel like Jessica’s hesitations about Mark are legit.) One of my JeanDaters remarked to a first date that it was strange he didn’t know what the back of her head looked like. Even for people who don’t seem to care about what someone looks like, baring your soul on Zoom is different than baring your soul to a physically manifested person with a specific head shape.
So if you’re an emotional/intellectual-first dater, Zoom dating is a fantastic way to find people you can form lasting connections with—but if you find yourself struggling, it could have as much to do with the medium than with the strength of match.
Lifestyle-first daters
There are many reasons someone might be a lifestyle-first dater. You might be really into the outdoors and want someone who can share that life with. Your friends and/or family could be really important to you and you want someone who can fit in with that. Your could be obsessed with your work—and want to be with someone who not only relates to that, but has a lifestyle that gives you the space to pursue your work interests. You could identify a certain way (with a certain social group, with a certain race, or as someone who values certain things) and want a partner who reflects that identity. For lifestyle-first daters, their romantic relationships are important, but they also have other important relationships, either with people or with passions). Lifestyle daters don’t just see their partners as a lifestyle accessory, but lifestyle compatibility is a prerequisite to forming a deeper connection.
Here are a couple of interesting things I’ve observed about lifestyle-first JeanDaters:
Many dating requirements are actually lifestyle requirements. I’ve noticed that many people have requirements regarding things like appearance, profession, or race not for personal reasons of emotional connection or physical attraction, but because it matters to them what their friends or family would think. While the books and movies would have you believe that it’s always more important to not care about any of that, walking away from their family, friends, or career is extremely difficult for a lifestyle-first dater.
Lifestyle daters are doing fine during lockdown. One might think that a Zoom call, stripped of any lifestyle context, is not a great way to evaluate lifestyle compatibility, but it turns out that lifestyle compatibility is the least squishy of the different ways to be compatible. And if lifestyle compatibility is the gating factor that someone needs to see before making themselves open to a deep connection, it’s not insane to imagine establishing that over the course of a couple of Zoom calls.
If you’re a lifestyle dater, you’re in luck! It seems like you can do just fine. And for those of you who don’t think of yourselves as lifestyle daters: you might actually be one, which would be good news for you.
Physical-first daters
I had thought physical-first daters may not do so well during the lockdown, but I was not entirely correct. Through running JeanDate, I’ve learned there are two kinds of physical-first daters. This conveniently allows me to make two bullet points to match the other two sections:
Visual physical daters are doing surprisingly well. For some people, having a partner that visually resonates with them, whether it’s the way they look, or the mannerisms, or the style, is important. These might have been people who previously assumed that they needed to meet somebody to get a sense of whether there was a resonance there. It’s still early to tell—and I don’t know what they results will be once people meet their matches in person—but it seems like video is a suitable proxy for determining that.
The JeanDaters who need the physical bond to feel close are not doing so well. There is another category of dater who likes to meet their matches in person: the people for whom physical chemistry is required for opening up romantically. I talked at length with one JeanDater who decided not to continue Zoom dating because, no matter how much they liked their matches, it felt strange to date someone when they couldn’t assess the physical dimension. They mentioned not feeling like they were fully expressing themselves without, for instance, being able to touch the other person’s arm to indicate they were joking. This is the only person who has articulated what’s off for them about video dating, but I suspect there are other people who feel this way, but haven’t quite put their finger on why.
Some people have surprised me because it’s turned out the physical dimension is less important than I had thought. And some people have surprised me by going the other way. Given that we expect the lockdown to end one day, there is not so much to lose (and self-knowledge to be gained!) even if you discover that you fall into the second category.
What does this mean for people looking for love?
Lockdown will end soon, but I believe that dating—especially first dates—are going to stay virtual for at least a little while. The good news is that there are people out there forming deep, and I hope lasting, connections this way. For most people, it helps to know what matters to you in a connection and which of those things you can assess over video. Knowing what matters to you will not only give you a sense of what Zoom dating will be like, but it can also help you figure out what could be going wrong if you’re not feeling a connection. It could also help you ask the right questions—and ask for the right interactions—to get to the place where you’re really connecting with someone. And I’m no dating expert, but I imagine this would be helpful for non-virtual dating as well.
💘 Yes, JeanDate is still going on! If you know me, message me and I’ll give you the link. If we have a mutual friend, message them and ask them to message me for the link!
👋 In my JeanDate communications I try to avoid talking too much about what’s going on in the world, since I do want to provide people an escape from the fact that you’re probably sitting at your kitchen table wearing the same pajama pants you wore yesterday. But I do want to make sure that we’re doing our part to help our communities, so I will ask that everybody consider donating to the fundraiser for The National Domestic Violence Hotline that I’m organizing in conjunction with JeanDate. I promise to keep running JeanDate for one more month for every $10k we raise!
